The article examines a suggestion about a mechanism of the effect of excessive imitation. The essence of the effect is that when facing a new object demonstrated by a grown up children tend to imitate ineffective way of  grown up's behavior, whereas control group of children of the same age which faces an object without grown up's mediation almost always find an effective way of using it accurately. Traditional points of view on the mechanism of this effect are shared by adherents of social explanation (grown up's authority, stereotypes of situation) and by adherents of causal explanation (deformation of representation of causal structure of an object). The experiment held by the authors shows that the effect of excessive imitation to a large extent depends on intentions of a grown up whose actions are observed by a child. It means that deformation of causal structure has its reason, and this reason is, apparently, social by its nature, although not superficially, verbally social.